One Retailer's Example of Creating "Benefit Offers"
All the meals at Vivendi’s Restaurant had always included a salad and bread with every meal, sort of the traditional Italian approach. However, owners Nick and Lucia were on vacation in the Bahama’s and they got a great idea on how to offer something more. They stayed at a hotel that offered an all inclusive package with breakfast, lunch and dinner as a part of the package with even a glass of wine with dinner. When they came back they started to offer a special meal every night which included dessert and a glass of wine with the meal. They price this package at about $5 less than the combination was separately. Not everyone purchased this package, but about 10-15% of their customer bought it. Lucia then suggested that they try a wine special. Two glasses of wine with any meal for $10 for a savings of about $3 per glass. This helped increase their wine sales which had been slipp
ing with their customers cutting back.
Bloglites
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Action Guides
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How To Stop Losing Your Customers!
it is easier to keep your customers than trying to get new ones. so, stop losing customers! this 7-page guide will help you learn ...and most importantly how to win them back.
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it's wonderful to have so many customers in your location that they may have to wait. do you and your staff do "the right things" to keep them happy while they wait? this 4-page action guide contains over 25 tried-and-true "right things" to keep your customers waiting contentedly.
How to Create Cooperative Promotions
do you know how to go about creating, implementing and nurturing successful co-promotions? this 4-page action guide spells out the step-by-step details to creating cooperative promotions that work!
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Book Excerpts
Be careful to not reduce your price too far in a recessionMember Comments
“we’re scheduling more ‘try me nights’ where people can come in and work out for free. we schedule these on the slow nights of the week and let our ‘regulars’ know that they’ll be a few more people here on those nights. we give our regulars who are in on the ‘try me’ nights a free juice drink to make up for any inconvenience.”todd h, cedar city, ut fitness center
“last summer we decided to focus on children in art. we took all items that even remotely seemed like something a child would like to work with and put them on sale. we have had weekly contests for children to participate in...a different theme each week....awarding them a small gift certificate.all of this naturally brings in parents...and we endeavor to engage them in buying their own supplies!.” hannah y, elsmwood, ct teacher supply store
we've started to give away bookmarks with the name, address, web and phone number for the store, and we drop several in a bag so people can share with their friends. we're trying to think of other low-cost freebies too, including book club reading lists, for customers.tom t., bookseller, spokane wa.
as far as comments on products or service we need to get better about getting out from behind the counter and interacting with our customers and creating a dialog. one of the things that helps is doing role plays with the staff on a regular basis and coaching them on how to converse with customers. most of the information we get from this is anecdotal, we don't capture it, but it can help to identify trends.” jackson t, miami, fl café owner
“at our store we ask the customer for their phone number when we are taking their order. our pos system allows us to collect that piece of data which we can later reverse append to get a land address. this is somewhat effective but can become expensive. more recently we are working on building our list of email addresses so we can communicate with our customers that way. we run different promotions to incent people to sign up (a contest where one person will win a $25 gc or 5 free lunches or something), but mostly we just try to have a consistent presence in our store letting people know about the online program and also tagging everything we do with our web address.”jackson t, miami, fl café owner
